Metacurrencys in TTRPGs: Luck, Fate, and other systems
Alex talks a bit about metacurrencies in TTRPGs and how the design of them influences gameplay.
Metacurrencies are an element of game design that I've been talking a lot with friends about lately, especially around how best they fit into different styles of game design/play. Since I've been thinking about it a lot, I want to explore that a bit here.
What is a Metacurrency?
"Metacurrency" is simply the term for a pool of points (coins, tokens, etc) that a player can spend in order to influence the outcome of the game in some way. In Pathfinder this is the "Hero" point which you can spend to reroll a failed roll, survive certain death, and a few other things. D&D 5e, it's "inspiration".
For me, the core feature of a metacurrency is that it sits outside of the character's domain of abilities and rests squarely with the player. Hit Points, for example, are simply a "currency" as it's an abstraction for the character's level of injury. The character knows that their HP is depleting, though not in a point-based mechanical way. By contrast, when the player spends a metacurrency they "warp" the fabric of reality to avoid something that could have happened and instead get another shot at a different narrative.
These come in a couple of different "flavors of use" and a lot of systems will use a combination of these:
- Allowing a chance at a reroll or different outcome based on the dice.
- Granting narrative control over a situation to a player.
- Changing the established fiction.
- Gaining an extra-natural bonus on a roll (prior to or after it).
- Preventing a bad outcome (like character death).
There are more, but you get the general idea.
Via metacurrencies, games tend to encourage different things; ranging in a spectrum from "have a small backstop to prevent disaster" as a nice-to-have all the way up to "fully invested in the core gameplay loop", so we'll look at a few games that I'm fond of and compare their examples.
Some Concrete Examples of Metacurrencies
Savage Worlds
Let's start with Savage Worlds as an example of one of the "simpler" uses of metacurrency. Savage Worlds has a metacurrency called "bennies" represented by chips or beads that have a singular purpose (in the core game): rerolling dice.
Likewise, they're awarded very simply. Players gain 3 bennies at the beginning of each session, the GM can award more at their discretion, and unused bennies are lost at the end of the session.
While I appreciate the simplicity here, I've found with systems that are this simple (just giving PCs an edge, GM awarding more when they feel like it) players simply don't use them nearly as much as they should. The GM (me) forgets to award them. They sit in a vast pile, sad and unused. That's been my experience most often with the very simple metacurrency systems.
I've found this is also generally true with other systems that have a similar contrivance. For example, D&D 5e inspiration - you generally forget it's a thing to grant. Some modern OSR games, like Shadowdark, also inherit this system with the "luck token".
There are probably countless other systems out there but these I categorize as having a metacurrency just as a "dice misbehaving" buffer. A nice bonus to prevent catastrophe, but otherwise not encouraging any particular play elements.
Plot Points from Cortex Prime
This is probably my favorite example of metacurrency because of how it's designed. They're similar to Fate points mechanically (the example right after this) in that they can add dice to a roll, activate powers or be used to create a story detail, but they also have a bunch of other uses (which I'll summarize since the text of Cortex isn't openly available):
- Create an Asset for the scene or session
- Create a relationship (the relationship mechanics of Cortex are really neat)
- Exploit the GM rolling a 1 on some of their dice to create an opportunity
- Activate Hero dice (which is itself another mod).
- A bunch of other ways depending on the mods you include
Gaining them is also robust:
- If the PC rolls a 1 on their dice the GM may grant a plot point to activate complication
- Good / exciting roleplay
- Conceding a fight
- Including a d4 in your roll
- A bunch of other ways depending on the mods you include
Overall the plot point system in Cortex is really broad, and can be used for a lot of things but for me the main thing it encourages is helping the players make sub-optimal choices for their characters or to accept interesting complications. The amount of things you can do with it in combination with the relevant mods makes this system very robust.
As a generic system, the flexibility of the metacurrency gives the players and GM a lot to work with to cultivate the type of play they want to experience at their table and that's great.
There aren't any major downsides I've encountered, they're visible enough that the players will use them and are just necessary enough that they're incentivized to acquire them.
Fate Core / Many Fate based games
Fate has a few of these, but it's absolutely integral to the gameplay mechanic. It's probably the most overt example I'm going to present, but it's also a great example of trying to encourage/emphasize a type of play through the metacurrency.
There's an entire page on the Fate Point Economy over on the SRD, but here's what you can do with them:
Invoke an Aspect: Invoking an aspect costs you one fate point, unless the invocation is free.
Power a Stunt: Some stunts are very potent, and as such, cost a fate point in order to activate.
Refuse a Compel: Once a compel is proposed, you can pay a fate point to avoid the complication associated with it.
Declare a Story Detail: To add something to the narrative based on one of your aspects, spend a fate point.
(FATE SRD)
Invoking an Aspect is essentially a +2 on the roll, so long as you can narratively weave that aspect into the action.
Here's how you earn them:
Accept a Compel: You get a fate point when you agree to the complication associated with a compel. As said above, this may sometimes happen retroactively if the circumstances warrant.
Have Your Aspects Invoked Against You: If someone pays a fate point to invoke an aspect attached to your character, you gain their fate point at the end of the scene. This includes advantages created on your character, as well as consequences.
Concede in a Conflict: You receive one fate point for conceding in a conflict, as well as an additional fate point for each consequence that you’ve received in that conflict. (This isn’t the same as being taken out in a conflict, by the way.)
(FATE SRD)
Taken together you can get a feel for what kind of a system this encourages: in order to succeed on rolls or use your powers / stunts, you need to have Fate points. To get Fate points, you need to let bad things happen to you. All of these things influence the narrative. For Fate specifically, the "bad things" also have to tie into Aspects, so in a character-driven game, this is using your character's strengths against them or playing up their flaws. The goal here (I think) is to encourage dynamic characters who's personalities and pasts get them into trouble just as frequently as they get them back out of it.
Contrasted with Cortex, Fate leans heavily into the character's attributes being the driving force of the metacurrency rather than the situation or their relationships, simply because the currency revolves around Aspects.
This can get a little weird when players want to invoke every aspect all the time because you wind up with massive piles of metacurrency sitting around until everything resolves though.
Blades in the Dark
The last one I want to cover is the Stress system from Blades in the Dark. This is another good example of a metacurrency that has a strong impact on the overall gameplay loop. Fortunately for us, Blades also has an SRD we can reference. The text is a little lengthy so I'll summarize what Stress can be used for:
- Avoid consequences
- Get a +1d to a roll or increased effect.
- Act while incapacitated.
- Flashbacks! (the coolest mechanic in BitD)
Recovering stress is keyed directly to downtime. To clear stress you must indulge your vice which both involves contacting an NPC and rolling to see how much stress you clear. If you clear more stress than you'd spent, you overindulge and bad things happen. If you happen to spend too much stress, you suffer a trauma which both takes you out of a scene and gives you a permanent character quirk that gives you more XP opportunities but also moves you one step closer to permanent retirement.
This creates an awesome feedback loop of spending stress during play to nudge odds in your favor, introduce story details (via a flashback), and risk taking trauma or overindulging. It fits really well into the overall vibe of the game.
The one reason this metacurrency isn't my favorite is because in practice my players would always take indulging their vice as a given during a downtime. It was just assumed that they would do that and someone would reduce heat. That feels like a feature to me, but I'd prefer it be less "given". I don't actually know what I'd do differently.
Metacurrency as Game Design
So, now that we've looked at some examples and I've established a couple of different points I want to dig a little further into the spectrum of "how deeply is the metacurrency embedded and what does that incentivize, if anything?"
On the "metacurrency-lite" side of the house, we've got limited utility tokens that are handed out occasionally or via GM fiat. These don't tend to influence gameplay very much. They're a nice to have, that the players might forget to utilize if something bad happens. Usually, that's not a bad thing, the game continues whether or not you'd have gotten a reroll. Occasionally, a player will remember much later after a character death and lament their forgetfulness, the GM will apologize, and we all move on with our lives maybe.
Removing the metacurrency from these systems might make the players a bit less likely to take risk without the potential backstop of a reroll, but really, I don't experience that. I think for many of these games removing them has very little impact on the game. Likewise, adding more uses might make the game a little more dynamic and tilt things towards the players a bit more, but otherwise not game breaking.
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got systems (like Blades) where the metacurrency is so embedded in one of the gameplay loops it's integral to how the game plays. All of the examples I've given in this post reinforce the core loops that they're embedded into. For Blades, that's the Score -> Downtime loop: you use stress during the score to manipulate the plot, and during downtime you recover the currency at the possible cost of overindulgence (creating more fodder for future scores). For Fate, it's a full on "economy" where the Fate tokens flowing is required for the game to continue moving forward, it's part of the core gameplay loop.
I think all of that is really cool, I personally love using Metacurrency systems as part of the core loop of my games and I think they add a lot. Especially when they're used to influence the narrative (did I mention I love the flashback mechanic?).
Wrap Up
So hopefully this was a nice introduction to metacurrency and my thoughts on them. I've included several links to other discussions and different opinions just below.
Thanks friends, see y'all next time!
Other Metacurrency Discussions
Darryl Mott
Oren Ashkenazi